Robot competitions have become popular in the recent past. The robot competitions are used as incentive to motivate people of all ages to become interested in math, science, and engineering; robot design and development; and used as entertainment events. One popular robot competition is organized for high school students and uses small robots on 12 ft. square fields. In these robot competitions, contestants of the robot competitions are asked to create robots to perform a wide range of tasks, such as picking up tennis balls, stacking blocks of wood, and everything in-between. Other popular robot competitions have been organized and conducted by people with robots built as a hobby to perform more advanced activities. Furthermore, more robot competitions have been organized by for-profit promoters, and match contestants against one another to design large, dangerous robots that clash in an arena for a fight, such as a boxing or wrestling match.
Robot competitions are generally concerned with five issues: (i) event safety, (ii) event integrity, (iii) event flow, (iv) event control, and (v) robot competition technologies. These five issues are important from liability, learning, and revenue generated standpoints. Event safety is an extremely important issue for robot competitions. Depending upon the robot competition, the robots may range in size from ounces to hundreds of pounds, and may reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour or more in relatively short distances. Additionally, the robots may include gripping devices, arms, and lifts to be utilized during the robot competitions that could injure spectators or robot operators.
While the size, strength, and capabilities of the robots may in and of themselves be dangerous, the event safety issue is exponentially increased due to tens or several hundreds of robots being entered in any robot competition. Contestants prepare and test the robots prior to entering the arena for an event, the contestants routinely lose control of their robots due to a robot malfunction, radio control interference, or human error.
With regard to radio interference, robot competitions have been conducted traditionally in two ways, (i) allowing contestants to utilize mixed, non-uniform radio equipment, and (ii) requiring contestants to utilize consistent point-to-point radio equipment. In the case of contestants utilizing mixed radio equipment, contestants generally have adapted model airplane radio controllers for the robots because these radio controllers have more capability and frequency channels than radio controllers for remote control cars, for example. However, because the model airplane radio controllers transmit at high power levels, generally two watts or more, these radio controllers are problematic for robot competitions due to, for example, radio frequency (RF) noise, electromagnetic interference (EMI), co-channel interference, and multipath effects due to being in an indoor environment. These radio control problems may cause unexpected effects, such as a contestant controlling a robot of a different contestant or a robot performing mysterious actions. Also, the use of mixed radio equipment often results in two or more contestants operating on or near the same frequency, which may likely cause a contestant to unknowingly drive a robot of another contestant, thereby creating a dangerous situation for the contestants, organizers, spectators, and robots. These model airplane and model car transmitters are, by law, not typically allowed to receive from the robot, and therefore do not permit feedback from the robot.
With regard to event integrity, an organizer of the robot competition is concerned with conducting a fair and honest competition. In the traditional robot competitions, contestants utilizing both the mixed and consistent radio equipment have no absolute regulation to prevent early starts, late starts, or late stops of the robots. For activity-type competitions, a contestant may cheat and start or continue the activity prior to or after a clock starts and stops. In a fight-type competition, a contestant may strike an opposing robot prior to or after the clock starts and stops. If such an early or late strike occurs, the opposing robot may suffer irreparable damage, and the contest may be jeopardized, thereby destroying the integrity of the event as the contest cannot be replayed. In more modern robot competitions, contestants utilize consistent point-to-point radio equipment with field controllers, arena controllers, robot controllers, and operator interfaces that have built in safeguards for safety and match start/stop control.
With regard to event flow, as radio controllers are essentially unregulated, including operating on the same frequencies and having high power transmitters, robot competition organizers are required to confiscate radio controllers from the contestants to minimize safety hazards. The organizers often utilize as many as fifteen people to confiscate and guard the radio controllers in a storage room. In the case of non-consistent radio equipment, organizers have instituted different techniques, including both low budget and elaborate techniques, to assign frequency channels to contestants. These techniques range from                (i) attaching a number to a clothes pin to be used for checking out the radio controller for a match,        (ii) utilizing a software program that helps ensure that two contestants do not operate on the same or close frequency simultaneously, and        (iii) utilizing a spectrum analyzer to monitor frequency channel usage. Even using these techniques to avoid having two radios operating on the same frequency, mistakes have routinely been made and safety has been jeopardized. It is common to find a contestant's radio to be transmitting on a different frequency than expected. Some common causes are human error, intentional misuse, mislabeled crystals, poor or old equipment, and lack of knowledge of the equipment by the contestant. Also, contestants routinely have additional radio controllers that are “backups” that are not confiscated and pose a safety hazard.        
In the case of using consistent radio equipment, such as having transmitters operating on frequency channels A, B, C, and D, confusion and accidents routinely occur as contestants have trouble with installation of the radio equipment, forget to return the radio equipment, or simply use their own radio equipment. Installing radio equipment into the robot electronics for the first time may produce unexpected results or no results at all. Contestants often wish to perform last minute testing of the robots prior to entering the robot competition. Without having a radio controller (because the organizers only have enough for competition purposes), such a test is not possible. Furthermore, as the robots may weigh several hundred pounds or more and be track driven, the contestants may need radio control to move the robot between different staging areas, and to load and unload the robot from the arena. Issues resulting from poor control of match starts and stops, as mentioned previously, leads to re-match requests by contestants for the reason of fairness. Re-matches cause havoc for schedules, adding complexity and confusion to event flow. Logistical problems associated with the event flow issue often cause delay before, during, and after a match, and alter smooth flow of the overall robot competition.
In the case modern robot competitions, contestants utilize consistent point-to-point radio equipment, often with field controllers, arena controllers, robot controllers, and/or operator interfaces to quickly connect robots to the correct operator interface, set proper radio channels, and eliminate other problems that result in re-matches. As these competitions grow in size, they become limited by the number of radio channels available. This limit is sometimes made worse by systems that use one radio channel per driver. Most modern competitions allow two drivers, similar to a pilot and co-pilot, to control the robot; thus sometimes using two radio channels per robot. Allowing feedback from the robot doubles the number of required radio channels again. Additionally, these competitions are becoming popular in other countries where radio frequency regulations vary widely. This often requires many different radios to be developed to allow competitions in these other countries. These issues with the number of channels directly effects event flow as the number of robots and contestants grows. Multiple fields become necessary to complete the event in a reasonable amount of time. As the required number of fields grows beyond the 2-4 fields commonly used today, event management generally becomes more difficult. Already, some events are forced to run alternating matches where a match on field “A” must finish before match “B” can start, and so on.
With regard to the event control issue, organizers of the robot competition are interested in controlling frequency usage and regulating start and stop times of the robots for safety, event integrity, and event flow considerations. However, traditional robot competitions have been unsuccessful in implementing a viable solution to handle the event control issue. While the coordinators have tried to regulate and assign frequency channels, problems still occur. Organizers rely on unregulated equipment and a contestant honor system. Data rejection via a checksum or robot identifier signal to be verified by the robots is an idea that simply has not been instituted. Also, contestants tend to start and stop a match early and late to gain a competitive advantage and frequency channels are routinely crossed due to a mix-up of issuing radio controllers by the organizers of the robot competitions.
With regard to robot competition technology, the rapidly changing nature of technology creates a desire to provide more sophisticated robot capabilities and more varieties of game play. Improved robot sophistication and variety of game play can help increase the learning potential to participants and increase the excitement for audiences. In the traditional and more modern robot competitions that use point-to-point radio technology, communication is limited to a driver-to-robot scenario, either one way or bidirectional. Modern computer networks allow robots to easily communicate and coordinate effort with other robots, often without human intervention. In addition, modern communication has brought a new instant messaging communication that allows text communications from human-to-human, and this could be extended to human-to-robot, robot-to-human, and robot-to-robot communications. Even greater technological advancements have been brought about by broadband communications that allow large amounts of data to be moved quickly, efficiently, and securely. This broadband communication has allowed for streaming audio and video, distribution of 2D and 3D maps, and large file transmission. Extending this broadband capability to robot competitions is currently limited by their radio technology.
With respect to variety of game play, robot competition games and the rules that govern the game are currently static. It is common for competitions to attempt to create new and exciting games, often changing the game every year. In traditional robot competitions, games tend to have one set of rules that are fixed throughout each match, and throughout the game season. Due to limitations in the communication of traditional robot competition, changing the game in the middle of the match cannot easily be accomplished due the inability to quickly and efficiently distribute the new rules instantly to any suitable number of contestants, robots, and perhaps even to the game field.